The Man Who Volunteered for Hell: Witold Pilecki’s Secret Mission to Auschwitz

The Extraordinary True Story of the Only Person in History Who Deliberately Got Himself Sent to the Nazi Death Camp

September 19, 1940. Warsaw’s Żoliborz district.

Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately positioned himself in the middle of a Nazi street roundup, allowing SS officers to arrest him alongside hundreds of other terrified Poles. As the trucks rumbled toward an unknown destination, Pilecki knew exactly where he was going—and unlike every other prisoner crammed into those vehicles, he was exactly where he wanted to be.

Within days, he would become Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859, the only person in recorded history to volunteer for imprisonment in what would become Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp. His mission was audacious beyond comprehension: infiltrate Auschwitz, gather intelligence on Nazi atrocities, build a resistance network among prisoners, and somehow get that information to the outside world.

What Pilecki couldn’t know as he stepped voluntarily into hell was that his classified reports would remain buried for fifty years, hidden by communist authorities who would eventually execute him as a “Western spy.” The world would not learn of his extraordinary sacrifice until the fall of communism in 1990.

The Making of an Unlikely Hero

Born into turmoil, forged by war

Witold Pilecki was born on May 13, 1901, in Olonets, Karelia—a remote town in the Russian Empire where his family had been forcibly resettled after Poland’s failed January Uprising of 1863-1864. The Pileckis were part of the Polish aristocracy, but their noble heritage meant exile to the frozen northwestern borderlands of the Tsarist Empire.

In 1910, nine-year-old Witold moved with his family to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he joined the secret ZHP Scouts organization. Even as a child, Pilecki was drawn to Poland’s underground independence movement—a foreshadowing of the clandestine life that would define his adult years.

The outbreak of World War I transformed the teenage Pilecki from scout to soldier. In 1918, he joined Polish self-defense units in the Wilno area, helping collect weapons and disarm retreating German troops. When the Polish-Soviet War erupted in 1919, Pilecki commanded a ZHP Scout section that was overrun by the Bolsheviks. Yet rather than surrender, he continued fighting, earning citations for gallantry in battles that would help secure Poland’s independence.

By 1921, Poland was free—and Pilecki seemed ready for a peaceful life. He married local school teacher Maria Ostrowska in 1931 and had two children, Andrzej and Zofia. Pilecki ran the family farm and enjoyed painting and writing poetry. For nearly two decades, he lived the quiet life of a country gentleman, raising his children and tending his land in what seemed like a fairy-tale ending to a youth spent in war.

Then, on September 1, 1939, the fairy tale ended forever.

When Evil Returns: The Nazi Invasion

Poland crushed between two totalitarian giants

On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later, the Soviets attacked from the east. Poland—reborn just twenty years earlier—was being carved up again by foreign powers. In August 1939, Pilecki was called up to defend Poland against the Nazi invasion.

Pilecki mobilized a reserve unit of local men he’d trained over the summer, but most of them were “peasants who had never seen action or fired a gun in anger.” Against the mechanized Wehrmacht, these brave but untrained farmers stood little chance. In a little over a month, the Polish Army was defeated, and the country came under Nazi and Soviet occupation.

But for Pilecki, surrender was not an option. Following the defeat, Pilecki made his way to Warsaw to fight with the Polish underground resistance (the Home Army) against Nazi occupation. He co-founded the Secret Polish Army resistance movement, one of many underground organizations that would merge into the Armia Krajowa (Home Army)—Europe’s largest resistance movement.

As reports trickled in about a new concentration camp called Auschwitz, the Polish underground faced a terrifying question: What was really happening behind those barbed wire fences?

A Mission Too Dangerous to Order

The birth of an impossible plan

The mass arrests, at first of mostly non-Jewish Poles, led the Nazis to construct new prison camps or refurbish existing structures, like the former military barracks in Oswiecim, Poland, which opened as the Auschwitz concentration camp in June 1940. The cynical injunction “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work makes you free,” loomed over its entry gate.

“The Polish underground movement couldn’t know what Auschwitz would become, but it had genuine interest in knowing what was going on inside,” explains historian Jochen Böhler. Initial reports suggested horrific conditions, but the resistance needed someone on the inside to verify the extent of Nazi atrocities.

In August 1940, Pilecki’s superior announced at a meeting that it had been proposed that Pilecki should infiltrate the Auschwitz concentration camp. Little was known about how the Germans ran the then-new camp, which was thought to be an internment camp or large prison rather than a death camp.

The mission was presented not as an order but an invitation to volunteer, though Pilecki saw it as a punishment for refusing to back his superior’s ideology. Nevertheless he agreed. The dangerous mission was entirely voluntary—he could have refused. Instead, Pilecki accepted what amounted to a suicide mission.

Then Pilecki got his first big mission: get arrested and sent to Auschwitz. At the time, the site run by Germany in occupied Poland was known to be a Nazi work camp for Polish prisoners of war. Pilecki was to gather information about conditions inside and organize a resistance cell, perhaps even an uprising.

Walking Voluntarily into Hell

September 19, 1940: The arrest

On September 18, 1940, using the false identity of Tomasz Serafiński, Pilecki deliberately placed himself in the middle of a Gestapo street sweep and was arrested along with 2,000 other men. Leaving his wife and two children behind, Pilecki was arrested on September 19, arriving in Auschwitz three days later.

Nothing could have prepared him for the brutality he found. As he leaped out of a train car with hundreds of other men, he was beaten with clubs. Ten men were randomly pulled from the group and shot. Another man was asked his profession; when he said he was a doctor, he was beaten to death. Anyone who was educated or Jewish was beaten.

Arriving at the camp, Pilecki and the crowd of men were driven forward by brutal beatings from the guards. Some men were pulled out of the group at random, unprovoked, and shot in the head to break any thoughts of resistance. The message was clear: this was a place where human life meant nothing.

Those remaining were robbed of their valuables, stripped, shaved, assigned a number and prison stripes, and then marched out to stand in the first of many roll calls. His head shaved, Pilecki hurried out of the bathhouse, though a guardsman knocked out two of his front teeth because he did not hold the sign with his prison number between them. From now on, Pilecki was neither himself, nor Tomasz, but a number – prisoner 4859.

Building an Army in Hell

Creating resistance in the most unlikely place

Most prisoners focused solely on survival. Pilecki had a different mission. His secret undercover mission for the Polish Underground: smuggle out intelligence about this new German concentration camp, and build a resistance organization among the inmates with the ultimate goal of liberating the camp.

At Auschwitz, he organized a resistance movement that eventually included hundreds of inmates—an almost impossible feat in a place designed to break the human spirit. “With almost a thousand men by 1942, and — barring for one incident with a Gestapo spy — not one of Pilecki’s men betrayed each other, in extraordinary circumstances of starvation and violence,” notes author Jack Fairweather. “He built something really powerful in that camp.”

The resistance network, which Pilecki called ZOW (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej—Union of Military Organizations), operated under the noses of SS guards and kapos. Members smuggled weapons, sabotaged equipment, executed informants, and maintained contact with the outside world through an intricate courier system.

The First Witness: Smuggling Truth to the World

Messages from the abyss

Starting in October 1940, the underground worked together to smuggle messages to the resistance outside. The first was sent via prisoner Aleksander Wielopolski. In Auschwitz’s early days, a few prisoners were able to secure their release if their families paid big enough bribes. Wielopolski was one of those few. Rather than risk smuggling out a paper report, Pilecki had him memorize it.

A young Polish officer, Aleksander Wielopolski, memorized Witold’s first report, delivering it to Warsaw in October 1940 as an oral account of the camp’s atrocious conditions, and the widespread abuse and murder of prisoners. This report was among the first to reveal the systemic violations of international law perpetrated by the Nazis.

Pilecki’s intelligence reports, smuggled out beginning in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the “final solution” for Jews. “By my count he sent at least 10 reports via secret messengers from the camp that charted Auschwitz’s evolution into a death factory,” explains biographer Jack Fairweather.

He described the start of the programme to euthanise sick prisoners, then the early gas experiments against Soviet POWs [prisoners-of-war]. Then, of course, the Holocaust itself. All of his reports made it to London. Each of them called on the Allies to take action.

The Unbearable Truth: When the World Wouldn’t Listen

Documenting the unimaginable

In July 1942, the first Jewish transport to be subjected to a selection for the gas chambers arrived from Slovakia and Auschwitz quickly morphed from a horrendous labor camp to the site of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Pilecki was witnessing—and documenting—the birth of the Holocaust’s most efficient killing machine.

His reports detailed the systematic murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the construction of gas chambers, and the arrival of cattle cars packed with Jewish families. Pilecki never knew whether his reports reached the Allies, but author Jack Fairweather and his researchers were able to track down how they were smuggled across Europe to the highest levels in London.

The information reached Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and other Allied leaders. Yet no rescue missions were launched. No bombers targeted the gas chambers. Pilecki smuggled reports about Germany’s war crimes to the Allies, urging them to stop the atrocities at Auschwitz by bombing the camp. But his warnings went unheeded.

The tragic reality was captured by an SS guard’s taunt to new arrivals: “However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him.”

The Great Escape: Breaking Out of the Unbreakable

April 27, 1943: The impossible becomes possible

By spring 1943, it was clear the Allies weren’t going to help the prisoners of Auschwitz. Without any outside help, an uprising would never succeed. Increasingly frail and in danger of being found out, Pilecki decided it was time for him to leave.

Barely surviving nearly three years of hunger, disease and brutality, Pilecki accomplished his mission before escaping in April 1943. It took months to plan, but he and two friends pulled off an incredible escape through the camp bakery in the early hours of April 27.

“In a feat as daring and unbelievable as his initial voluntary imprisonment, he broke out of the camp and delivered to Warsaw some of the first verification of the Jewish extermination.” From there, he sneaked into Warsaw, where he was briefly reunited with his wife and children.

The War Continues: From Auschwitz to Warsaw

A hero’s burden

Pilecki began working for the resistance again, but the symptoms of what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder dragged him down. He “struggled to connect” with his friends and family, and wrote day and night about the horrors he had witnessed. Pilecki wrote his report in Polish in the summer of 1945 for his Polish Army superiors—a comprehensive account that would become known as “Witold’s Report.”

When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, Pilecki volunteered for service with Warszawianka Company. Initially, he served as a common soldier without revealing his rank to his superiors. After many officers were killed in the early days of the uprising, Pilecki revealed his true identity and accepted command.

Pilecki was one of thousands who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest action taken by a European resistance group in World War II. In the end, the Soviets held back their advance so the Nazis could crush the Poles. Then they swooped in and took over.

Betrayed by “Liberation”: The Communist Tragedy

When heroes become enemies

“For a lot of us in the West, we think of May 1945 as the end of the Second World War in Europe, and parades and so on,” explains author Jack Fairweather. “Pilecki’s story is a powerful reminder that what happened in Eastern Europe was the Allies gave Stalin a free hand to occupy and subjugate half of continental Europe. And the war didn’t end for so many people.”

For Pilecki, the war was far from over. He remained loyal to the idea of a free Polish republic and continued sending messages to British intelligence. After the communist takeover of Poland, he remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile. In 1945, he returned to Poland to report the situation back to the government-in-exile.

By December 1945 he had arrived in Warsaw and begun organizing an intelligence gathering network, working under various assumed names as a jewelry salesman, a bottle label painter, and as the night manager of a construction warehouse. But the communist authorities were closing in.

The Final Betrayal: Trial and Execution

A hero becomes a “spy”

He was arrested by communist authorities on May 8, 1947, tortured repeatedly by the secret police. Pilecki was tortured, but in order to protect other operatives, he did not reveal any sensitive information. While interrogated, Pilecki sought to claim full responsibility for what the anti-Communist underground movement had done. His interrogation was personally supervised by Józef Różański, who headed the Investigative Bureau at the Ministry of Public Security.

In prison he was tortured barbarously: his nails were torn off, his legs were crushed, his testicles were crushed. The trial of Witold Pilecki and his companions began on March 3, 1948 at the headquarters of the Warsaw District Provincial Court. The captain pleaded not guilty to spying and staging a plot to kill key figures in the Polish police.

Accused of spying and of planning to assassinate key figures in the Polish police, he was coerced and tortured to sign his ‘confession’. Pilecki stood an unfair trial where he was not permitted to testify, nor were there any defending witnesses. The trial was a sham – a deterrent to any other would-be opposition to the Communist regime.

On May 25, 1948, at 9:30 p.m., Pilecki was executed by a shot to the back of the head at Mokotów Prison in Warsaw. According to a Polish newspaper, as he was led to his death, he said, “I’ve been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy than fear.”

Pilecki’s burial place has never been found, though it is thought to be in Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery.

The Lost Years: When Heroes Become Ghosts

Forty years of enforced silence

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Zofia and Andrzej Pilecki found out their father was a hero. As teens in postwar Poland, they had been told he was a traitor and an enemy of the state, and they listened to news reports about his 1948 trial and execution on the school radio.

Because underground resistance fighters were considered enemies of the state by the communist Polish regime, Pilecki’s surviving family members were treated as undesirables. His wife worked as a house cleaner in a Catholic orphanage.

Pilecki’s story was suppressed for half a century after his 1948 arrest by the Polish Communist regime as a “Western spy.” He was executed and expunged from Polish history. Pilecki’s reports remained hidden away in Polish archives until the 1990s.

Resurrection: When Truth Finally Emerges

1990: Justice at last

It was only in September 1990 that the Supreme Court acquitted Captain Witold Pilecki and his companions, revealed the unjust nature of the sentences issued, and emphasized the patriotic attitudes of the convicts. On October 1, 1990, Pilecki was finally exonerated posthumously and distinguished for his actions during World War II.

The honors began pouring in. In 1995, he received posthumously the Order of Polonia Restituta and in 2006 he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish decoration. On September 5, 2013, Pilecki was posthumously promoted to the rank of colonel of the Polish Army.

Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, wrote in the foreword to a 2012 English translation of Pilecki’s report: “When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory.”

Historian Norman Davies wrote: “If there was an Allied hero who deserved to be remembered and celebrated, this was a person with few peers.”

The Moral Legacy: What Pilecki Teaches Us

Lessons from the man who chose hell

“What made Pilecki stand out was that he was compelled to act,” reflects author Jack Fairweather. “His story reminded me that empathy is a choice – just like his decision to volunteer for Auschwitz in the first place.”

In an age when bystander apathy often prevails, Pilecki’s story poses uncomfortable questions. When confronted with evil, do we turn away or step forward? When the cost of moral action is almost certain death, what do we choose?

“The Nazis were counting on the world turning away from their crimes,” Fairweather notes. “Pilecki asks us, no matter how gruesome the subject, no matter how difficult our own circumstances, that we never stop trying to understand the plight of others.”

Author Jack Fairweather is in the process of applying to Yad Vashem for Pilecki to be recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. While Pilecki was not Jewish, his efforts to save Jewish lives—including giving money to Jewish families through Barbara Newerly, who was hiding in Warsaw—demonstrate that heroism transcends ethnic and religious boundaries.

The Ultimate Sacrifice: A Life Measured in Others’ Lives

Why Pilecki’s story matters today

Witold died believing that he had failed to deliver his message. He never knew that his reports had reached the highest levels of Allied command, or that they would eventually become some of the most important eyewitness documentation of the Holocaust.

Pilecki’s story is a powerful reminder of the way many Poles were forced to bury their war experiences for decades, comparing it to if the American heroes of D-Day had been treated as traitors and pariahs.

Today, a number of institutions, monuments, and streets in Poland have been named after him. The Pilecki Institute facilitates interdisciplinary and international analysis of totalitarian regimes and their global consequences. His story has been adapted into books, documentaries, and stage productions, ensuring that his sacrifice is never forgotten.

The Bottom Line: Witold Pilecki voluntarily endured nearly three years in history’s most notorious death camp, built a resistance network under the noses of SS guards, smuggled out the first detailed intelligence on Nazi atrocities, fought in the Warsaw Uprising, and ultimately gave his life for the cause of human freedom. His story, hidden for fifty years by communist authorities, represents one of the most extraordinary acts of moral courage in human history. In an age of increasing global authoritarianism, Pilecki’s example reminds us that ordinary people can choose to do extraordinary things—even when the cost is everything they hold dear.

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